


Fierce

by hellkitty



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen, I Don't Even Know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-28
Updated: 2015-05-28
Packaged: 2018-04-01 17:22:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4028377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Long crazy guitar riffs, meet purple prose. Pretty much threw what I knew about blind people and dreaming and Coma's backstory in a blender with a genprompt bingo prompt, and here you go.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fierce

Sometimes, he dreamed.  He tried not to, tried to force his brain awake, pads on metal strings until his fingers ached, until exhaustion gnawed his bones, pulling him into its lair.  If he lasted long enough, awake, he wouldn’t dream, but he never knew before if it was enough, never knew until he jerked awake, hours later, limbs tight and stiff, mouth parched, fingertips stretching over the gritty ground for the comforting curve of his guitar.  

They brought him food:  cool, sweet water, fruit, and a thick sort of gruel he scooped up with his hands. (He’d never gotten the hang of the spoon, putting it sideways, upside down, and putting it in the bowl every time was more trouble than it was worth. But he could trust his hands to find the bowl).  He’d guess, if anyone asked, and if he could answer, they brought it once a day. He knew, faintly, what days were. He remembered his mother explaining, his mother always talking about checking the time, day or night--words that had no meaning to him, and lost meaning to her, down in the mines. 

Coma remembered everything she ever said, her voice the first music he’d known, remembered learning emotions through the timbre--the tension of fear, the glissando of anger, the soft lilt of the words she’d murmur, drawing him in close. 

The darkness of the mines bothered her, but never him. It was too full of sounds to navigate by, nothing too high or far that he couldn’t stretch out and reach, unlike the open spaces on the edge the Citadel he’d stood at once, feeling air whistle around his toes, and some chasm beckon beneath him.  

They gave him a guard afterward, less a warden than a chaperone, one of the War Pups, normally, with a small voice filled with questions he didn’t have the voice to answer.  He didn’t mind the questions: they were something to fill the time.  And he didn’t mind the audiences, the way the War Boys would mass outside his place, or pull him into the repair bay, a dozen eager hands pulling him along like little waves. He’d hear the drumming start, wrenches on stone or engine blocks, a slow building beat, that throbbed into his blood and his fingers would start itching with music waiting, needing to be let out.  

And sometimes, when he dreamed, that was what he dreamed--hearing the thunder of the drums, the music already leaping around him like flames, and he would lose himself in it, and wake, emptied out and sad, his body rested but his heart feeling scraped and hollow.  

And sometimes he dreamed of that other thing, his mother’s voice a crescendo of fear like he’d never heard, and the pounding of feet, chasing, and his own feet stumbling on the ground, pushed down by her fear, until she shoved the child he had been, bodily, into a blind cut.  “Be fierce,” she’d whispered, she would whisper again, in his dreams, and he’d felt--and feel--the warm press of a kiss on his forehead, the squeeze on his arm, and she left him again, night after night, and he heard the long screams of terror and pain, stretching past endurance, tearing past time’s ability to measure, and he could hear the only sound he could make--ragged jagged hiccups of sobs, wet and rending. 

Sometimes Coma dreamed.  He tried not to, but today, waking up to the war drums summoning, his heart already syncopating the beat, the dreams of loss were not so bad.  Be fierce, he told himself, in her echoing, stretched skin voice, (the closest he'd have to a voice of his own), as he hefted the heavy war guitar in his arms, staggering under its weight to a light he couldn't see and a glory he could only hope to touch.  



End file.
